Posted tagged ‘national trust’

This blog post is byNicola Bairdsharing ideas about thrifty, creative and eco-friendly ways to raise children. What do children make of the National Trust’s 50 things to do before you’re 11 and three quarters challenge? For more info about parenting see my bookHomemade Kids,or for my website click here.

“I’ve hunted for treasure on a beach so many times!” I’m listening to Lola, 13, running through the National Trust’s 50 things to do before you are 11 and three quarters. She looks so happy remembering some of those activities as she shouts out – “I’ve made a mud pie! I’ve done wild swimming in the Lake District! I’ve built dens! I’ve danced in the rain; did that just a couple of days ago in the hail. My friend Freya taught me how to call like an owl. I’ve never caught a butterfly in a net, but that’s because I didn’t want to do, I know it can hurt their wings.”

Turns out she’d done 47 out of 50. Looks like our summer family challenge will be lighting a fire without matches (baffling though you tube is your friend, along with wirewool and a 9v battery!), going geo-caching (which is an organised form of treasure hunt) and get over our butterfly worries – possibly by raising caterpillars.

The list suggests so many fun ideas including damming streams, camping and looking into a pond. You might want to try it (with or without children):

Climb a tree

Roll down a really big hill

Camp out in the wild

Build a den

Skim a stone

Run around in the rain

Fly a kite

Catch a fish with a net

Eat an apple straight from a tree

Play conkers

Throw some snow

Hunt for treasure on the beach

Make a mud pie

Dam a stream

Go sledging

Bury someone in the sand

Set up a snail race

Balance on a fallen tree

Swing on a rope swing

Make a mud slide

Eat blackberries growing in the wild

Take a look inside a tree

Visit an island

Feel like you’re flying in the wind

Make a grass trumpet

Hunt for fossils and bones

Watch the sun wake up

Climb a huge hill

Get behind a waterfall

Feed a bird from your hand

Hunt for bugs

Find some frogspawn

Catch a butterfly in a net

Track wild animals

Discover what’s in a pond

Call an owl

Check out the crazy creatures in a rock pool

Bring up a butterfly

Catch a crab

Go on a nature walk at night

Plant it, grow it, eat it

Go wild swimming

Go rafting

Light a fire without matches

Find your way with a map and compass

Try bouldering

Cook on a campfire

Try abseiling

Find a geocache

Canoe down a river

To tick off your own list and info about the National Trust’s campaign see here.

Over to you
Makes me half want to imagine a list of 50 things you should have played with from a toy manufacturer – no doubt all linked to buying something. What about you – how did your children get on with this list?

There’s a new shocking report asking us to reflect on how we bring up kids. It’s picking up the concerns first identified by the US’s Richard Louv, who coined the term “Nature Defecit Disorder”. See here or his provocative books Last Child in the Woods or Nature Principle which uses the first book’s theme – nature defecit disorder – and applies it to unhappy adulthoods.

Fewer than ten per cent of kids play in wild places; down from 50 per cent a generation ago

The roaming radius for kids has declined by 90 per cent in one generation (thirty years)

Three times as many children are taken to hospital each year after falling out of bed, as from falling out of trees

A 2008 study showed that half of all kids had been stopped from climbing trees, 20 per cent had been banned from playing conkers or games of tag

Seems that children are consequently losing the sort of skills everyone used to have:

One in three could not identify a magpie

Half could not tell the difference between a bee and a wasp

But nine out of 10 could recognise a Dalek.

It’s horrible to think how little our children and their friends know about the natural world. Obviously it’s not every child – today my 10 year old and I identified the first flowering cowslip in a flowerbed on the way to Crouch End. Not long after we saw the first suggestion of bloom on the hawthorn tree (loads of people confuse this with blackthorn although once you know, they really are very different). Apparently you can teach nature ID skills so long as you get the child before they’re 12. Rubbish really, I learnt to identify native British tree species only after going on a BTCV course as a 30something.

A dog walking friend told me last week she often asks in writers’ workshops “what’s the most dangerous thing you’ve done?” If my mum was playing this game she could tell the times she and her elder brother flattened themselves against the gale to edge around the lighthouse light, 15m or so up, right over the rocks and terrible tides of Strangford Lough. I cringe thinking about the danger my mum put herself in. But it meant she had no worries about letting me go out riding on a pony (who wasn’t great in traffic, had no brakes and was far too strong for me!) from eight-years-old onwards. In contrast my workshop writer friend says some of the children accompanying parents in her sessions say they left the top off a pen overnight… Silly? Perhaps. Dangerous? No!

Without understanding risk and danger it is hard to make good judgement calls about what’s safe for either you, or your friends – or your (their) children. Or your career, say, or what level of undress you should post yourself in on Facebook

Getting back to nature. It could be resolved says report author TV’s Stephen Moss:

Let them be free-range kids“We have all seen the headlines about the decline in children’s play in the outdoors.

“We all know the benefits being outdoors can bring, and as parents we want our children to spend more time outdoors than they do.

“But despite this overwhelming evidence and the different initiatives and schemes run by organisations across the UK, our kids are spending less and less time in the outdoors.

“The time to act is now, whilst we still have a generation of parents and grandparents who grew up outdoors and can pass on their experience and whilst there remains a determination to do something positive in this area.

“Organisations that have an interest in this area, whether working in our towns and cities or in the countryside, have to connect what they are doing and commit to a long-term approach that really makes a difference.”

What next?
The National Trust is planning a two month inquiry – so you can provide ideas, suggestions, or just follow what’s happening as a conversation. See:

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